Gabriella Medgyesi: Career profile of László Lugossy
The same can be said of László Lugossy as of Zoltán Huszárik, that he only made his best films. His extended study time and late start may have prevented him from joining a natural generational momentum, but his constitution also predestined him to consistently make only those works that he fully believed in and was truly ready to shoot. At the same time, all three of his feature films are reference works in the history of Hungarian cinema, cited in the literature as positive exceptions and exceptional achievements of certain trends, curves and content eras, and it is also unique in his oeuvre that all three were awarded prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival.
His first film, Különös Melódia (Strange Melody), was made in 1969, based on a short story by Frigyes Karinthy. It is a strong start to his career, not only because it is a work with a special ability to create form and atmosphere, but also because it is a particularly nuanced and powerful self-reflection on the creator's life situation: the inner struggle to find an autonomous, valid directorial voice and not lose it in the process of preparation and waiting. In László Lugossy's vision, Karinthy's circus loses its magic, only its strangeness remains: it becomes a metaphor for a hostile and oppressive world, a strange phalanx of a silent training ground without human voices and human reactions, which must be conquered, conquered, taken in with blood, tears and sweat by anyone who wants to come into the light: in front of an almost invisible audience lined up like little papier-mâché figures at an unattainable height. “Art is not a game. It takes spirit, not fiddling. The audience wants to see something and be excited,” says the director in the film. These are not Karinthy's words, but those of the screenwriter Lugossy, who in his later films testifies to the truth of all these statements. His works, regardless of style, speak with elaborate, thoughtful and consistently executed imagery about serious moral questions, which are partly induced by the time depicted and partly by the processes at work in closed human relations. It is a different matter that the audience of these films never gets a mere, superficial experience, because there is no easy way to experience Lugossy's stories: to reach the catharsis, we had to ask ourselves the questions of the heroes: who are we, and how much knowledge about ourselves is necessary to live with dignity, and can we let history pass over our once human existence (Identification), how much is human life worth, is there a price, in money, in strength, and are we willing to pay it (Thank you, we're fine), can we give up our beliefs, our ideals in exchange for survival (Szirmok, virágok, koszorúk (Petals, flowers, wreaths)?
It was seven years between the making of Különös Melódia (Strange Melody) and the first feature film, Azonosítás (Identification). Lugossy could not and did not want to fit into the documentary wave of the BBS that started in the 1970s; his interest was in feature films. The direction of his thinking and his film projects were present-day stories about generational conflicts (A Dorkó család magánélete (The Private Life of the Dorkó Family); A két Sámán (The Two Shamans)) and A mentőöv (The Lifebelt), set in the 1950s, from a short story by Géza Szentgallay, but neither of these were realised. However, his idea for Azonosítás (Identification), a joint project with screenwriter István Kardos, turned to recent history. It is set in an unspecified time, sometime around 1947-48, when soldiers are returning home en masse from prisoner-of-war camps. The name of the protagonist, the former orphan András Ambrus (György Cserhalmi), was exchanged for that of his escaped comrade Gábor Takács, who was assigned to him by the guard to make up the numbers. Now, when he is released with various benefits (including a piece of land), he wants his name back. His stubborn and determined insistence on his own identity makes everyone angry and suspicious. The police officer thinks he is hiding something sinful, his colleagues are afraid he will get them into trouble, his former master is after his land, and Csató (József Madaras), a communist repatriation commissioner struggling with his own search for a place and his own ideas, is distracted from his otherwise unpleasant work.
“The historical films of the seventies, even the experiments in the genre of “eastern”, always carry some kind of “authorial” meaning, a “historical” lesson, projected from the present onto the past.” Parabolic films “relate events of the past to the present in two ways: By modelling the possible conflicts of a real historical situation, they reinforce the socio-ideological forces of the present (Arc (Face); A magyar Ugaron (On the Hungarian Ugar); Bekötött szemmel (Blindfolded); Segesvár; Petőfi '73); or they describe the abstract laws of history and society by analysing the structure of the past (Jancsó's age that began with the Égi bárány (Lamb in Heaven) and the film Prés és a Bástyasétány hetvennégy (Prés and Bástya Avenue 74), writes Gábor Gelencsér in his book A Titanic zenekara (The Orchestra of Titanic), a book analysing the styles and trends of the 1970s 1. He counts Lugossy's Azonosítás (Identification) among the few solitary attempts to break out of this parabolic tradition of abstraction. On the one hand, the film is very concrete: it is essentially the first film to depict the transitional, controversial, little discussed, unprocessed period from the end of the World War II to the “clarification” of the balance of power and the emergence of a new, dictatorial social order. On the other hand, it is a psychological drama, very much personality-centred and psychologically perfectly portrayed: a man who has never been fully himself, but who has found in his miserable fate a kind of subordinate identity, clinging to what he has alone: his own name. “We have chosen the fate of one of the hundreds of thousands of people who were driven into the World War II so far that by the time they recovered they were already out on the Don. [...] These people did not think in terms of world politics, because they had no say in it. Violent historical disasters depersonalize people, it is no longer important who is called what, who thinks what and what they want. A personality forced into inaction by history is not only physically but also psychologically vulnerable. We are interested in how much personal consciousness remains for people who have lived through historical events. What could the individual do? Was the soldier guilty, taken in a cattle car to the trenches? Were the Hungarian people more guilty than the others in this war? These are not small questions [...] because historical indifference is an even more insoluble medium than historical errors”, says the director.2 And so András Ambrus is one of the hundreds of thousands who accidentally survived the war. At the beginning of the film, he is sitting in the doorway of a cattle car with several of his companions, the camera zooms in on his face. This face will frame the film: at first, even a smile crosses his face as he throws his girl out of the train. It's a powerful metaphor: rid of the last (and probably only) personal object outside, he leaves behind a meaningless and hostile past. Who is it he says, who is it he shouts out to his companion clinging to the knocked-over piece of tin: “Don't you understand that we have arrived, even now? We are home! We are home…” At the end of the film, the same face looks us straight in the eye. But his gaze is no longer one of stubbornness, but of serenity, not of expectation, but of woundedness and loss: he has his name back, but at what cost? No one understands why he is so attached to his own name, and he himself cannot articulate it, because it is so natural, even if it is only stuck on the child he has taken from the asylum. He realises his unreflective life when they try to take away the only thing he has to hold on to. For who is he? “He hardly speaks, hardly moves. He moves and hits when hit. He runs when chased. Who is he? He has no name. His struggle for identity, however difficult, however creaky, can only be understood in the end by a man as stubborn as he is, a man as lost in the drift of history as he is: Csató, the former partisan who cannot find his place after the war. “The revolution of the peaceful days was invented by respectable family mothers in the marriage bed and in the kitchen. They told their dear husbands not to stray too far from the house. Can't you see they were living in detail? She asks her comrades after they don't support her going to Greece to fight. Profession, family. Small revolution, small peace. The slap is neither small nor big. Medium. Like give and take. (...) Do we have a historical mission or not?” Initially, the same question of detail for Ambrus. At the same time, he is suspicious, as if he can forgive no one, not even himself, for having survived the battle. In comparison, the sequel, he feels, is nothing. “Listen to me. That name brought you home, you know? What's wrong with him? Does it matter what it's called? Your name was given to you by the army and the box. With the bread. He always had a name. He brought his foot home in his own boot. You can raise both hands above your head. He's outlived them all. Even his name. Even that unfortunate Gábor Takács. How do I know he wouldn't want to take his name off for some dirt? What if he slit someone's throat?” she asks the man. The fury and passionate search for truth that pushes Ambrus back to him again and again finally convinces him. He understands that this man's name is his country. “This man has come a long way, he must finally find his way home,” he tells the policeman. And at the end of the film, András Ambrus, now with the identity card in his pocket, turns around once more and looks us straight in the eye. So that we can take a good look at him and identify his face in all circumstances, always.
László Lugossy's film is lean, limited to the analysis of scenes, his realistic style concentrates on dialogue written in plastic, flowing language and condensed, natural acting. József Lőrinc's camera builds a deliberately functional visual world in which the not for a moment implausible conflict between the two protagonists and their clashes with their environment can be brought to life in a natural way, while also creating accurate backdrops of the period. At the same time, in this seemingly detached narrative, there is a constant tension and anxiety at work: the viewer is drawn in by this story, full of drama, passion, struggle and failure, which offers a broad historical horizon and depth, both backwards and forwards. László Lugossy's directorial virtue is already evident in this first film: his ability to create a 'human scale' perspective embedded in personal stories. The same human proportion is present in his subsequent films, albeit each set in a different period.
In 1980, his committed interest in public life led the director to a contemporary theme in his second film, Thank you, we have you: his first-generation working-class heroes live in the self-exploitative captivity of the so-called second economy, which was then at its height, sparking social controversy and being sociologically explored. The subject matter fits in with the traditional social interest of Hungarian cinema, but the approach breaks with the publicist stance. “The “acting” film heroes of the sixties are replaced in the seventies by shadowy figures lurking in the shadows; the fate of the wasting, crisis-stricken, superfluous people is the most recurrent motif in the film art of the period”, writes Gábor Gelencsér in his already cited work. At the same time, most of the films of this period seek to “separate personal conflicts from social conflicts, or to integrate the sociological situation into personal fate, and even to place the latter before the former. [...] There are only three works of the period that are able to present a large-format human drama within the framework of realistic narrative, using the sociological components of conflict, while at the same time going beyond the didactic “message” of social conditions: Zsolt Kézdy-Kovács: Ha megjön József (When József arrives), Márta Mészáros: Kilenc hónap (Nine Months) and László Lugossy Köszönöm, megvagyunk (Thank you, we're fine).”
The film is a chamber piece, set in just a few locations: most of the scenes take place in a half-finished house under construction in the capital's agglomeration, where chance and fate bring together, almost imprison, the two heroes on a forced path: the 40-something factory worker József B. (József Madaras) and the 17-year-old girl Éva (Júlia Nyakó). It is a desolate and barren land: a gathering place for families who have moved from the villages and are trying to make a home for themselves by working with their hands, in second shifts, exploiting their physical and mental strength, with the money they earn in the second economy through various self-supporting enterprises. “It is hard to imagine a more desperate situation than when the necessity of life becomes the purpose of life “4, and József B. has no purpose in life other than to build his house alongside his daily work. He is left alone in this 18-20 hour a day struggle, his wife dying from toiling, his daughter with relatives in the countryside until he can bring her home. At the factory, he meets Éva, who has moved from home to the capital in search of a better, easier, freer life, and who lives in a hostel, first cleaning his house for money, and then, before he knows it, he is almost buying her labour: she is given housing in exchange for work around the house and in the small-scale chirping of chickpeas. “The deal promises to be mutually beneficial. Éva does not have to go through all the torture of the old wife, and József B. has an untender woman lying in his bed, working diligently around the house; so there is hope that this family can be brought together with less nerve and blood sacrifice than all the others in the neighbourhood. Yet the dream does not come true. Why? Because that first round demanded too great a sacrifice from József B., who can only begin the second attempt with the first one having been through a harrowing experience and with his values distorted in the meantime. Éva's futile efforts to correct these values are the only way out of this house. Because this house has not only destroyed the old woman, but also József B., squeezing out of him the human quality that she refuses to give up and which she almost loses her life defending”, says the director 5 of his heroes, who also uses subtle psychological devices to trace another plane in the film: before slipping into a simple drama of exploitation and blackmail in front of a sociologically accurate backdrop, he begins to build a parallel drama of the relationship between women and men, of the inability to love. For the wild Éva, despite the constant verbal clashes over money and lifestyle, is impressed by the man's attention and appreciation, if not initially for her femininity, then for her hard-working nature. Not with passion, not with love, but willingly, she enters into a sexual relationship with József, who tries in his own way to tame her. But he can no longer cope with the fact that Éva is pregnant: the old reflex bursts out of him with elemental force when the goal seems to be collapsing, to build a house for himself and the child. “I can understand a birth and a funeral here. I'm sick of all this life and death stuff. This house is the only thing everyone sabotages” he blurts out, shooing the girl away. She doesn't realise that in doing so she has forever denied herself the chance of a less self-destructive life, where there is no more premature death, which is probably waiting for her, only life. Maybe. When he then resigns himself to the situation because of external constraints (he cannot send her away because she is registered to him) and his remaining humanity (he is not inherently bad, he is just worn out in physical caring and loss, his probably unchiselled emotions), and, again in his own way, assures Éva of a future together (he brings her home, leaving her in his care), all personal attachment in Éva has disappeared. One of the most powerful scenes in the film is when József, wheelbarrowing bricks in the rain and mud, loses his strength and realises how empty his life is. He doesn't understand exactly why, or his role in it, but he gives up. “I'm not working anymore, I've had enough. I've worked enough, even too much. Who's better off for it? Because it hasn't for me, that's the heptychrist. I'll be free, understand?” he says to Éva when drunk, and Éva attempts suicide shortly afterwards. The director leaves no doubt that, although Éva’s escape into loneliness and József's alcoholism are two different ways of the same failure, it is the girl who may still have a chance.
As in Azonosítás (Identification), the low-realistic form places great emphasis on the acting and acting skills, which is László Lugossy's great virtue, József Madaras and Júlia Nyakó are at the top of their game in this film. József Lőrinc, working with the director for the third time this time, has once again proved himself a master of the invisible presence with which he follows the most subtle nuances of acting in the tightest of spaces. Almost imperceptibly, the three seasons presented also merge into one another, reflecting and projecting the state of mind of the heroes and the stages of their relationship as a result of a conscious dramaturgical decision.
Szirmok, virágok, koszorúk (Petals, flowers, wreaths)
Compared to these two films, the third film of the oeuvre, Szirmok, virágok, koszorúk (Petals, flowers, wreaths), is in some ways a radical change, but it is also more a return to the lyricism of the first film, Különös melódia (Strange Melody): a poetic style of representation, an overtone that allows a wider scope for imagination, emotion and passion, replacing the method of dramaturgy based on analysis with a “dramaturgy of ambiguities “6 and a relatively more distant, descriptive visual world with a suggestive, sometimes painterly and dreamlike plasticity. The film is a unique combination of the impeccable acting, guided by a sensitive director's hand, a script (István Kardos - László Lugossy) that opens the way to both visions and precise dialogues, an outstanding visual world (Elemér Ragályi) and an eternal moral stance.
The story begins with the World War II armistice and continues in the Bach era, exploring the choices and decisions of a family as they examine the survival options and moral dilemmas of the post-revolutionary period. Thematically, Lugossy's film fits into the wave that started in the mid-1970s, when several filmmakers chose the distant past, the period following the 1848-49 war of independence and the period before the 1867 conciliation, as their subject (András Lányi: Segesvár; Gábor Bódy: Amerikai Anzix (American Anzix); Sándor Sára: 80 huszár (80 Hussars); Judit Elek: Mária-nap (Maria day); Miklós Hajdufy: Klapka-légió (Klapka's Legion). The explanation for this was also sought in a compilation by Filmvilág7. Ákos Szilágyi wrote in the journal's round question: 'The artists of the 1970s and, at least until now, the 1980s were not concerned with the Event, but with what followed it or what was obscured by the historical façade of the Event: history living and living on in the consciousness of the individual and on the level of everyday life. This is when it becomes most evident that history can only be authentically recalled in the context of personal consciousness and not in the context of institutionalised ideologies. The “shrinking” of history, its relegation to the everyday, the personal, the intimate, becomes at the same time the starting point for its authentic interpretation and experience. Private history, which pluralizes History, is not only “partial” or “subjective” history, but also real history, because it is history in the making, history that continues with the person. [...] The hero of Után (After): the survivor, whose very existence needs moral justification. The survivor has fallen out of the historical community: Után (After) is an era of the disintegration of community forms and ideologies. The survivors themselves are not a community but a multitude. But in their isolation and autonomy there is also the possibility of moral autonomy.”
Ákos Szilágyi sheds very precise light on the message of Szirmok, virágok, koszorúk (Petals, flowers, wreaths): not only participation in important destiny matters, but also the assumption of the following is a moral, i.e. life-and-death issue. The protagonists of the film all provide a kind of answer. And the fact that they form a family gives the story a special warmth and dimension: the motivations and the consequences of their actions become more nuanced. “When István Kardos and I were looking for a medium for the film, the family was important to us not only as a traditional dramatic structure, but also as a terrain for a war for souls “8,” says the director. And indeed, the protagonist, Ferenc Majláth (György Cserhalmi), a former lieutenant-general, a member of the dethroning parliament, is the origo in the family, who can and must be morally aligned with on the one hand, and on the other hand, the small community must be protected from him. The uncle (Jiři Adamira) is a principled official in the empire's Interior Ministry, who is able to bring Ferenc, who has been conscripted into the Austrian army after the surrender, home. His nephews are the newly widowed, lithe, disheveled Kornél (Linda Bogusław), “a free-loving journalist of the revolution turned imperial censor, by night he is passionate about the ideas he persecutes by day “9 and the young Miklós (Péter Malcsiner), a blind and fervent believer in the revolutionary ideal. Alongside them is Ferenc's wife Maria (Gražyna Szapolowska), who is the eternal woman who holds the family together, the mother of Kornél's children, but also a woman in love who must choose the future, security and survival. And among them is Ferenc, who at the moment of the fall, in the ring of Russian officers, replies to his fellow soldier's sentence “God, please let me forget this shame!” ”God, grant that I may never forget.” Ferenc is in internal exile, a prisoner of himself inside and out, unable to forget and unable to forgive himself. “I owe my freedom to a commander. I must either make peace with it or hang myself (...) The politician of the failed revolution must either be in prison or on the gallows or in exile or in exile.” At the same time, he is about to give in to the family's prodding and pulling, when one night the Colonel (Lajos Őze) turns up, orders Ferenc to be ready to call out the invisible army if it announces the day of the uprising that is being organised, and swears Miklós in as Kossuth's soldier. This night (one of the most beautiful and strange scenes in the film and probably in Hungarian film history, woven with candle flames, shadows, the light of the foggy dawn, the psychedelic images of spaces divided by mirrors and delicate, delicate facial expressions) will seal the fate of each of them. The next day, the family members are arrested (and soon released, thanks to the intervention of their uncle), but Ferenc is sent to prison, where he (apparently) goes insane, is committed to a mental hospital, and one day, when a seditious article appears in a foreign newspaper under his name, he sets himself on fire in his cell. A very nice solution to the dramaturgy is to leave a lot of things vague and not answer a series of seemingly important questions. Who reported the family on the day of the Colonel's visit? Perhaps it is the Colonel who tells the Lieutenant-Colonel that the aged March youths who want to reconcile with the authorities should be anonymously reported to the prisons for training? Who wrote the article, Ferenc, or perhaps Miklós on his behalf, or a comrade who wanted to use him as a victim in this way, in good faith or deliberately, for the 'good cause'? And is Ferenc really mad, or is he just pretending to be mad so that he won't be expected to cooperate and spare Maria the consequences? There is no clear answer to any of these questions in the film, and the director leaves it to the viewer to decide, as well as to judge, what the right moral response is in this and all similar, constantly recurring historical and, let us add, everyday situations. László Lugossy's questions in 1984-85 and since have been so timely that almost every analysis raises analogies with the revolution and its aftermath in general history and 1956 in particular. “This is a new way of perceiving history: everything that has happened to man is constantly happening, it is not closed, it is not a dead past, it is not an irreversible fate” writes Ákos Szilágyi. Only to this extent is it history at all. Therefore, the recollection of history in these films is neither entertaining nor allegorical, neither an act of mourning nor an inventory. They remind us that what happened then is still happening to us. They reclaim the history of the person, and in doing so they reassign the dignity of responsibility. This is the cinematic aspect of the unfolding intellectual process of our historical self-recovery, which only makes sense in relation to the individual and national history. “We can speak of the past only as it is true in the present, not as it was true in the past” says the eminent economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein, “and films like Amerikai Anxiz (American Anzix) or Szirmok, virágok, koszorúk (Petals, flowers, wreaths) speak of the historical past in precisely this way.”
1. Gábor Gelencsér: A Titanic zenekara. Stílusok és irányzatok a hetvenes évek magyar filmművészetében (The Orchestra of Titanic. Styles and Trends in Hungarian Filmmaking of the 1970s) (Osiris Kiadó, Budapest, 2002)
2. A sorsokban átélhető történelem – Beszélgetés Lugossy Lászlóval (History through the lens of fates – Interview with László Lugossy) (Marianne Ember, Filmkultúra, 1976/2.)
3. Filmlevél – Azonosítás (Film letter – Identification) (Gábor Thurzó, Tükör, 6 April 1976)
4. Filmlevél – Hogy vagyunk? (Filmletter – How are we?) (László Fábián, Film Színház Muzsika, 7 February 1981)
5. Kibírják-e az emberi kapcsolatok a rájuk nehezedő terheket? – Beszélgetés Lugossy Lászlóval (Can relationships withstand stress? – Interview with László Lugossy) (Géza Pörös, Filmvilág, 1980/12.)
6. A hét filmjei – Szirmok, virágok, koszorúk (Films of the week – Petals, flowers, wreaths) (Ervin Gyertyán Ervin, Népszabadság, 10 January 1985)
7. A történelem visszavétele (Taking back history) (Essays by Béla G. Németh, András Gergely, György Szabad, Ákos Szilágyi, Filmvilág, 1985/2.)
8-9. Eszmék és lelkek csatája – Beszélgetés Lugossy Lászlóval (The Battle of Ideas and Souls – Interview with László Lugoss)y (Géza Pörös, Filmvilág, 1985/1.)